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Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island
Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island
Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island
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Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island

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Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author’s videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks.

Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory, creating an elaborate discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes. Author David E. Sutton focuses on micropractices in the kitchen, such as the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough, along with cultural changes, such as the rise of televised cooking shows, to reveal new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday living.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 19, 2014
ISBN9780520959309
Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island
Author

David E. Sutton

David E. Sutton is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life and the coauthor of Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies.

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    Book preview

    Secrets from the Greek Kitchen - David E. Sutton

    Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

    CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE

    Darra Goldstein, Editor

    Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

    Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island

    David E. Sutton

    UC Logo

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Oakland, California

    © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Sutton, David E., 1963–

        Secrets from the Greek kitchen : cooking, skill, and everyday life on an Aegean island / David E. Sutton.

            pages    cm—(California studies in food and culture; 52)

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28054-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-520-28055-7 (pbk. alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-95930-9 (e-book)

        1. Cooking, Greek.    I. Title.

    TX723.5.G8S88    2014

        641.59495—dc23

    2014006567

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    List of Video Examples

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: Why Does Greek Food Taste So Good?

    1. Emplacing Cooking

    2. Tools and Their Users

    3. Nina and Irini: Passing the Torch?

    4. Mothers, Daughters, and Others: Learning, Transmission, Negotiation

    5. Horizontal Transmission: Cooking Shows, Friends, and Other Sources of Knowledge

    6. Through the Kitchen Window

    Conclusion: So, What Is Cooking?

    Epilogue: Cooking (and Eating) in Times of Financial Crisis

    Notes

    References

    Author Index

    Keyword Index

    Illustrations

    1. Aleka and Evdokia Passa cooking lentils in their home kitchen

    2. Dimitra Kampouri rolling dough on a sofra

    3. Katerina Kardoulia and Katina Miha stuffing the Easter lamb

    4. Nikolas Mihas preparing the outdoor oven

    5. Nikolas feeding the oven while his mother-in-law, Katerina, looks on

    6. Nikolas bricking up the oven, while his friend gives advice

    7. Manolis Papamihail eating garlic bread in the kitchen of his downtown home

    8. Irini Psaromati and Manolis Papamihail in the kitchen of their summer home with family friends

    9. Irini in her favorite spot

    10. Nina Papamihail enjoying a cup of coffee at her kitchen table

    11. Nina cooking American-style baked beans with sausages

    12. Katina Miha preparing coffee in her kitchen

    13. Angeliki Roditi in her kitchen

    14. Manolis Papamihail demonstrating the secret to making the best Greek coffee

    15. Katerina Miha making coffee for her mother and father

    Video Examples

    The video examples discussed in this book are available at www.ucpress.edu/go/greekkitchen. All videos were shot by David Sutton unless otherwise noted. Interested readers who want to go further in exploring Kalymnian cooking may find these and additional videos on YouTube at www.youtube.com/channel/UCZhvwUWSdxHSHM0Frx3J17Q/videos.

    1. Cutting Medley (2005). Katerina Kardoulia cutting potatoes for a stew, Nina Papamihail cutting an onion for a salad, and Katerina’s granddaughter, called Little Katerina Miha, cutting zucchini for an omelet.

    2. Polykseni Cutting Eggplant (2008). Polykseni Miha slicing eggplant.

    3. Polykseni Making Mushroom Pies (2008). Polykseni Miha and the author rolling phyllo dough.

    4. Evdokia Rolling Dough (2011). Evdokia Passa rolling dough in her restaurant kitchen.

    5. Georgia Rolling Dough (2001). Georgia Vourneli rolling dough for a leek pie. Video by Michael Hernandez.

    6. Katerina and the Can Opener (2006). Katerina Kardoulia opening a can of tomato paste.

    7. Nina Making Octopus Stew (2005). Nina Papamihail preparing an octopus dish in the kitchen of her summer home.

    8. Kitchen Choreography (2006). Katerina Kardoulia and her daughter, Katina Miha, preparing several dishes for a Lenten meal while negotiating the limited space of Katerina’s kitchen.

    9. Little Katerina Learning Cooking (2006). Little Katerina Miha preparing a zucchini omelet for the first time, under the direction of her mother, Katina.

    10. Little Katerina Making a Salad (2008). Little Katerina Miha making a salad for her father in her grandmother’s kitchen.

    11. Little Katerina Describing a New Dish (2012). Little Katerina Miha describing how she started making her own béchamel sauce instead of buying it from the store, and also how she prepares a dish with rice and vegetables.

    Acknowledgments

    This project benefited from the generous hospitality of a number of Kalymnians who shared their kitchens and ideas with me. In particular I’d like to thank Nomiki and Mihalis Tsaggaris, Popi Galanou, Pavlos Roditis, Yiannis Gavalas, Polykseni Miha, Polymnia Vasaneli, Nikolas and Katerina Maïlli, Irini and Savas Ergas, and Mihalis and Julia Koullias. Also thanks for hospitality and stimulating conversations in Athens to Susannah Verney and her lovely family.

    Three families have been particularly central to this project. Without their help and friendship I can’t imagine having gotten to this point. To Yiannis, Angeliki, and Dimitris Roditis I’m grateful for all of our many shared conversations and meals. Angeliki has been like a second mother to me, and ruminations with her over freshly squeezed orange juice, not to mention avgozoumi and other culinary treats, always got my day off to a good start. In Carbondale, Illinois, Yiannis’s paintings are a constant reminder of his thoughtfulness, care, and shared love of talking about Kalymnian tradition and history, and I miss him tremendously since his passing in 2006. Dimitris, too, treated me like a brother, and I’m so pleased that he is learning the joys of fatherhood with such a delightful young son. Dimitris’s lovely wife, Evdokia, and mother-in-law, Aleka Passa, have been extremely generous in welcoming me into their restaurant kitchen and putting up with my endless questions, even in the midst of preparing the day’s meal for customers. And their papoutsakia definitely made it worth slipping from my vegetarianism.

    Nina and Manolis Papamihail, as well as Nina’s mother, Irini Psaromati, were always gracious hosts to me and my family. I had no inkling when Nina and my wife, Beth, first became friends how central her family would become to my research. I appreciate all our discussions over the years about the advantages and disadvantages of life on Kalymnos and in the United States. Nina’s willingness to keep a three-month food diary, and allowing herself to be pestered on a regular basis about what she was making on any particular day, was truly saintly. I’m so glad I was able to be there for part of her long-awaited trip to the United States, and to follow her on her culinary journeys.

    Finally, I especially want to thank Nikolas and Katina Miha and their children, Yiorgos, Vasilis, and Little Katerina, who have been my longest and most trusted friends on Kalymnos; I have had uncountable meals and conversations in their kitchen over the past thirty years. Visiting with them and becoming part of their daily lives has made returning to Kalymnos a great pleasure, and seeing the continuities and changes in cooking practices over three generations in their family has been truly fascinating. From the time they nicknamed me Kyrios Gallorizos for my early linguistic gaffe, I have felt part of the family, for, as Clifford Geertz wrote, to be teased is to be accepted. Katina has always been willing to give me the inside scoop on Kalymnian social and gender relations, and related her stories with characteristic style and humor. Of course, the center of the family for most of the time that I’ve known them was Katina’s mother, Katerina Kardoulia. From the first day we met, when I was sent to help her collect pine cones for her leather-tanning operation (as part of the study abroad program on which I first traveled to Kalymnos), we both felt a connection in our shared attitude of openness and curiosity about the wider world, while not neglecting the importance of the mundane pleasures of good food, good tastes, and talk about food. No one was more central in making me feel at home on Kalymnos, and the many and varied conversations we have had and feelings that we’ve shared over the past thirty years on life, politics, religion, and family have become very much part of who I am. When Katerina died in late 2012 after a long battle with cancer, part of me went with her, and it is very hard to imagine Kalymnos without her central presence. While Katerina’s husband, Yiorgos, died toward the beginning of this particular project, his hospitality and generosity to me over the years, and his many stories and prodigious memory of Kalymnos past were constant touchstones for me. Little Katerina, who is now no longer so little, has taken on the mantle of her grandmother while shaping her own ways in the world, and it has been a delight to get to know her and see her change over the years.

    During the process of thinking about this project, I had the chance to present it in a number of different forums. I’m grateful for the opportunity provided by anthropology departments at Yale, Harvard, Indiana, Illinois, Sussex, Vermont, Concordia, Panteion, Mytilini, and Vytautas Magnus universities, as well as by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA, and the Department of Food and Nutrition at New York University. Thanks for invitations and ensuing stimulating discussions (often lubricated by good meals, of course) go to David Howes, Jane Cowan, Vytis Ciubriskas, Akis Papataksiarchis, David Graeber, Michael Herzfeld, Alma Gottlieb, Martin Manalansan, Sid Mintz, Elinor Ochs, Margaret Beck, Amy Bentley, and Rhona Richman Kenneally.

    I also had the good fortune to present early versions of this work at a Wenner-Gren conference in 2003. Thanks to Chris Gosden, Elizabeth Edwards, Ruth Phillips and the other participants for an intense and stimulating time. A similarly inspiring environment was provided by the European Institute Summer School Program in Tours. Thanks to Marc Jacobs, Harry West, and Peter Scholliers for their kind invitations and delightful discussions.

    Jim and Renate Fernandez have been tremendous mentors and friends over the years of this project, and their home a haven of tasty and nourishing food, company, and conversation. Ever since Jim spoon-fed me while my arms were full with my newborn son Sam, I have been at least unconsciously aware of the connections among food, continuity, and cultural transmission. I appreciate all that Jim has taught me, in both the explicit and implicit ways of master and apprentice, in the craft of anthropology, and have enjoyed tremendously the many long discussions with Renate about food and the world of nature, as seen from our differing but ultimately complementary perspectives.

    A number of people carefully read all or parts of this manuscript, or simply provided intellectual sustenance over the years, and I’m particularly grateful for their input into the development of my thinking about issues of skill, transmission, and cooking. Thanks in no particular order go to Nick Doumanis, fellow lover of barbounia; Antonio Lauria, to my knowledge the best Marxist pasta-maker; Janet Dixon Keller and Charles Keller, for great conversations and kava too; Neni Panourgia, who cares about food and things Greek in deeply profound ways; Heather Paxson, with whom I’ve crafted a panel and many thoughts on the subject of skill; Ilana Gershon, who has been a delightful friend and confidant about the latest anthropological trends; Krishnendu Ray, for always-stimulating conversation and always bringing me together with the right person (often over a fabulous table); David Beriss, font of information about all things alimentary; Carole Counihan, whose work is an ongoing inspiration; Wendy Leynse, for helping me think about bringing children into the picture; Charles Stewart, for much-appreciated dialogues about history and historical consciousness; Faith Warn and Russ Bernard, two lovely friends and interlocutors about our shared passion for things Greek and Kalymnian; Fred Myers, whose thoughtfulness and guidance to a younger scholar were always appreciated; Yiannis Hamilakis, with whom I’ve shared many discussions about the growing field of sensory anthropology; Rick Wilk, always generous with ideas and culinary passions; and Nina Glick-Schiller and Steve Reyna, who push me to defend my positions, always in a loving way. I’ve also been grateful for the intellectual companionship of Renée Hirschon, Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, Rachel Black, Daniel Knight, Tony Webster, Juan Rodriguez, Jane Fajans, and Roberto Barrios.

    Particular thanks as always to Peter Wogan, my anthropological muse, always ready to chew on a question of grammar or of theory. Without you, it just wouldn’t be as much fun! And thank God for the disagreements. And the rules. And the goals. Amy Trubek has become a close colleague these past years, and her shared interests in everyday cooking have been a tremendous boon for my thinking about questions of skill, taste, the strange ways of molecular gastronomists, and other topics of concern. Both Peter and Amy have reminded me that the best anthropology grounds theorizing in everyday realities, questions, and curiosities and has at least something surprising to say. Eleana Yalouri’s hospitality, friendship, and careful reading have all helped shape this project, and she and her husband, Karl, have provided many stimulating conversations and even some good arguments. I’m particularly grateful for their hospitality to my family, and even a much-needed yoga class. Eleana’s shared interest in material culture and sensory anthropology, and our many discussions about the work of current luminaries like Daniel Miller and Tim Ingold, have been a real pleasure as well.

    And special thanks to Leonidas Vournelis, my student and colleague with whom I wrote chapter 5, who has taught me too many things to count. But of course, that’s why, as David Graeber would say, we owe each other favors and not debts. Leonidas’s family has also contributed to this project. Georgia Vourneli was the first guinea pig to agree to be filmed preparing a spanakopita, and she inspired my thinking on a number of the issues developed herein. Thanks also to Hercules Vournelis and Dimitra Kampouri for providing the photograph that adorns the book cover. I also want to thank other students with whom I collaborated in one fashion or another, and who shared my passion for thinking about cooking as a subject of anthropological scrutiny, especially Michael Hernandez, with whom I got this project started, and who had a considerable impact on helping me see the methodological benefits of video ethnography; Meghan Fidler, whom I could always go to for trenchant thoughts on cooking techniques and their anthropological implications, not to mention the best udon soup this side of Tokyo; and Kaitlin Fertaly, who has picked up the torch of cooking ethnography with her own developing work in Armenian kitchens, and who provided drink for thought in the form of heavenly pomegranate wine. Lindsey Baker was instrumental in transferring my videos to YouTube, and I’m very grateful for all her hard work. Greg Wendt’s help with the videos all along the way has been invaluable. And thanks to Eric Collier for his help with indexing.

    I am grateful to my family for their help and support. My mother, Constance Sutton, couldn’t believe I was writing another book about food, but she taught me all along to take women’s ideas and activities seriously. She has been a constant interlocutor in my understanding of feminist anthropology, and has even come around to seeing food as interesting. My son Sam was a tremendous help with the videos, and with the difficult task of creating still photos from some of the videos. Sam also did the filming for a few of the videos during our trip to Kalymnos in 2009. Stay afloat! My son Max put up with my endless computer questions with patience and humor. And my wife, Beth, has shown tremendous faith in my anthropological projects and in my cooking over the years.

    Finally, Kate Marshall, at University of California Press, provided much thoughtful guidance and direction and was lovely to work with. My thanks to her, Stacy Eisenstark, and the press staff.

    Parts of chapter 4 were published in Material Culture Review (Sutton 2010). Parts of chapter 5 first appeared in South European Society and Politics (Sutton and Vournelis 2009), copyright Taylor and Francis. Parts of chapter 6 were published in History and Memory (Sutton 2008), and parts of chapter 2 in Social Research (A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory, Social Research 75: 157–80). All are reproduced here by permission of the publishers. The research for this book has been reviewed and approved by the SIUC Human Subjects Committee.

    Introduction

    Why Does Greek Food Taste So Good?

    Tonight, only two mezedes [appetizers] are served: a bowl of freshly picked yigantes—gigantic white beans—oven-roasted with tomatoes, carrots, and parsley, and a slab of the undramatically named dopio tyri (local cheese), which turns out to be the richest cheese I’ve ever tasted on Thasos, its equal portions of goat’s and sheep’s milk held together by a tender membrane of rind. When I begin swooning over the cheese, pestering the men with inquiries, they point to a scarecrow sipping tsipouro in the corner. That’s the shepherd there, they tell me. . . . When we ask him about the cheese, he tastes a slice from his impossibly weathered fingertips. It’s not mine, he says. This is some other man’s cheese. There’s too much goat in this one. With that, he nods and returns to his corner and his drink. (Bakken 2013, 14)

    Nomiki is describing to me the making of a meat sauce for the dish pastitsio. She begins by listing the main ingredients, and then she comes to the spices, noting, I added cinnamon, garlic, onion, pepper, bay leaf. . . . Here she reaches into the pan to pull out a bay leaf and says, I’m using my hand. It doesn’t matter. Cooking requires hands. After listing a few more ingredients, she adds, The ingredients don’t go in all at once. One at a time. There’s an order in cooking. You’ll put in the cinnamon, then after a little bit the pepper, the salt, the bay leaf, one by one, so that you can hear the smell of each ingredient. (Author’s fieldnotes, May 2006)

    Both of these extracts capture something of the unique taste of Greek food, the first from a culinary memoir by poet Christopher Bakken and the second from my fieldnotes during my own research. Bakken’s text captures the sense of the taste of place, that the flavor of food is shaped by its environment and the profoundly local knowledge of process and small differences that are the stuff of endless conversation in Greece. As many Greeks will tell you, and as I have experienced myself, no matter how hard you try to reproduce the same dish outside its local context, you won’t be able to because the sun, soil, and air will be different, leading to different flavors. If you have ever traveled and then tried to reproduce the flavors of your trip in your home environment, you will know that the results tend to be ghostly reflections of your memory of the original dish.

    The extract from my fieldwork is a reminder that taste is not only embedded in the context of place, but in a cultural context in which the senses are enculturated in specific ways—in this case, through a stress not only on careful technique, but on the ways that all the senses need to work together in creating proper flavors. Synesthesia, the union of the senses, has always been a major feature of food practices on the island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where I have conducted research for the past two decades. The easy expression of this synesthesia encapsulated in the intriguing phrase hear the smell was only emphasized by Nomiki’s comfortable tactile engagement with the ingredients as she dipped her hand confidently into the bubbling meat sauce to scoop out a bay leaf—captured and preserved on my video camera—while all at the same time emphasizing that cooking is far from a haphazard affair; cooking involves forethought and order.¹ If anything had impressed itself on me during my research in Kalymnian kitchens, it was that the flavor of food, and how that flavor was achieved, was a matter of deep concern to Kalymnians, women and men, young and old.

    Indeed, even though men are not the primary cooks on Kalymnos, it became clear to me during my research that cooking matters to Kalymnian men in a fundamental way. It is fascinating to me to observe men talking to other men on Kalymnos about the details of cooking, details that they may never need to put into practice in their daily lives. Men on Kalymnos are typically accidental cooks; yet they will still express fascination with cooking processes and their variations—the way to cook an octopus, for example, by either removing or conserving its sea water, or the importance of adding feta cheese directly to a dish of green beans in tomato sauce so that the cheese absorbs the sauce. These are some of the topics that men spontaneously raise with other men, and that they pass on to young boys as part of a valued cultural knowledge of flavors on Kalymnos. Kalymnians care about cooking because flavor matters to them, because it represents one of their deeply held values—or at least so it had always seemed.

    COOKING, DEAD OR STILL BREATHING? OR, WAS THE ANTHROPOLOGIST TOO LATE ONCE AGAIN?

    This book is an ethnography of cooking knowledge and practices on Kalymnos, an island in the Dodecanese chain, just a few miles off the coast of Turkey. It explores the ways that cooking is transmitted, reproduced, and transformed among several generations of Kalymnian cooks. It poses this question: are cooking traditions passed down from one generation to the next, and if so, how?

    Why should this matter, one may ask, to anyone except the Kalymnians with whom I worked? The question of the fate of cooking knowledge in our so-called modern world is a topic of ongoing concern, as many bemoan the supposed death of cooking. Michael Pollan (2009), for example, suggests that we have moved from the kitchen to the couch, as cooking has become a spectator sport to watch on TV, but not to attempt to reproduce at home (as it was, presumably, in the days when food TV meant Julia Child). Similarly, a New York Times article notes that what used to be a 60-minute gourmet column now has been trimmed to 30 minutes. 30 is the new 60, the author notes ruefully (Grimes 2004). Apparently, the only time that Americans spend more than half an hour in the kitchen these days is when they’re cooking for their canine or feline companions. Considering my project, was I condemned to old-fashioned salvage ethnography, lamenting another lost tradition captured in writing just before its last flames flicker out in practice? Or are rumors of the demise of cooking greatly exaggerated?

    The study of cooking knowledge and its transmission raises questions about the fate of tradition generally, and the potential loss of cultural and linguistic diversity that is feared to accompany the decline of all sorts of practices labeled traditional. Some scholars and activists who wish to fight the loss of tradition through the preservation of traditional linguistic, ecological, or other knowledge seem to end up abstracting and objectifying it, as if knowledge were a freestanding object that can be treated with the tools of resource management. As Julie Cruikshank argues about the sensory practices and stories that are interwoven with the reproduction of knowledges among Tlingit and Athapaskans, creating the idea that truthful knowledge can somehow be ‘captured’ and recovered in databases; such studies seem to do damage to northern visions when statements by knowledgeable people are stripped from evocative contexts and taped, transcribed, codified, and labeled.² In the realm of food, this approach is reflected in the seed banks that attempt to preserve the diversity of agricultural plant life separate from the knowledges and contexts in which these plants have been grown.

    When we turn to cooking, we can see similar attitudes and approaches reflected in the vast dissemination of recipes on the Internet and in mass media, the kind of food programming that Pollan sees as leaving us deskilled couch potatoes, able to name and describe a crudo or the uses of a shiso leaf, but with no actual ability to produce such exotic, not to mention mundane, concoctions. Pollan holds that transmission of cooking knowledge has lost its traditional, female context with the rise of women in the workforce and the lure of the fast-food industry, while food programs on TV have not replaced such traditional female sources of transmission, but simply made us better able to know how to order in fancy restaurants: As a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, ‘How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?’ (Pollan 2009).

    Recent times have also seen the rise of a movement known as molecular gastronomy, which claims to transform cooking by using laboratory science to rationalize stylistic and aesthetic conceits and eradicate tacit knowledge from culinary practice (Roosth 2013, 8, 7). In this view, the transmission of cooking knowledge is not something that is being lost by modernity and must be preserved by external, technical means. On the contrary, as practiced in France by Hervé This, one of its leading exponents, vernacular skills transmitted intergenerationally—from parent to child or from chef to trainee—get left out of French cuisine as it is reinvented as rational and positivist.³ He and his colleagues believe that cooking’s old wives’ tales will stand or fall based on their confirmation or disproof in his laboratory—or as another molecular gastronomist put it, ‘Because for a lot of centuries our ancestors did this one [recipe] like that, [so] we do it like that and maybe it’s wrong. It’s wrong. And molecular gastronomy can explain why it’s wrong.’

    These ideas run parallel to those found in other domains of the contemporary food scene, such as the magazine Cooks Illustrated, which purports through extensive empirical testing to create recipes that are replicable and perfectible (a subject discussed further in the conclusion to this book). Note that whether traditional cooking knowledge is something to be preserved or discarded, it is seen as an object, like a recipe or a technique, which can be detached from its context and made to speak for itself, without distraction, in the objective setting of the scientific laboratory.

    As an anthropologist who has been conducting fieldwork in Greece for more than two decades, I have a different view of tradition and its relation to tacit knowledge and its transmission. Traditional knowledge is not frozen in time; rather, it is deeply responsive to social and material environments, as those who study processes of learning and apprenticeship have long argued. The ethnography that follows is an argument for what is revealed about cooking when one starts from a more complex and contextual understanding of what ordinary people have been doing in kitchens. It is only when we move away from static notions of tradition that we can begin to understand and assess the actual impacts of something like the rise of food television on everyday cooking practices. If, as a generation of scholars has shown, learning always occurs in concrete contexts, deeply shaped by social, historical, and material environments, then we must seek to study cooking in its contexts rather than separate it from them.

    Such an approach allows me to ask questions about tradition that include the following: Has cooking ever passed smoothly and directly from mothers to daughters? How does the choice of cooking tools and technologies shape everyday notions of identity and morality? Why might Kalymnians choose to cut vegetables in a way that cooking specialists would label inefficient and dangerous? I am not suggesting that Kalymnos represents an exotic repository of tradition to be contrasted to our modern ways of cooking—as we will see, Kalymnians struggle with some of the same contrasts. But I am suggesting that by taking seriously everyday practices and values in ordinary kitchens and presenting them for scrutiny, we can develop new perspectives on why people make the choices they do in their kitchens, and why those choices matter to them.

    ENTERING THE KALYMNIAN KITCHEN

    When I returned to Kalymnos in the summer of 2005 for the first time with a video camera, intending to record some of the processes and practices of Kalymnian kitchens, I found much that had changed since previous trips. Young women were dressed in the latest fashion, a rarity during my research in the early 1990s. The first big supermarkets, carrying diverse frozen foods and preprepared meals, had opened the previous year, while specialty stores offered wasabi mustard, Thai curries, and a variety of Mexican seasonings that had not existed previously. Cooking shows were now a regular feature on Greek TV stations, and they seemed popular with many Kalymnians. And the discourse of health, while not absent in the past, seemed to have been quantified; people discussed cholesterol numbers with confidence and precision.

    One thing that struck me as both new and seemingly an echo of American concerns over loss of cooking skills was the succinct claim I heard repeated by many older Kalymnians: The younger generation doesn’t cook anymore. Nowadays claims that cooking is dead roll off the tongue of many Kalymnians, its passage seen as one of the ambivalent fruits of modernity that has been threatening to overtake the island during the decades that I have been doing fieldwork there, and no doubt for much longer. On a Greek sitcom about four single women seeking love and fulfillment titled Alone through Carelessness, I watched one of the heroines shopping diffidently in the pasta aisle of a supermarket. She is confronted by a more matronly-looking woman who says, Pasta, pasta, all pasta. Don’t you younger women know how to cook anything else? That’s why men don’t want to leave their mothers.

    This statement suggests that such discussions are not merely descriptive but moral discourses, laced with gendered assumptions. As I argued in my earlier ethnography of Kalymnos, the balancing of tradition and modernity is seen as the most significant moral issue faced, individually and collectively (Sutton 1998). Here I am attempting to get at some of the real changes as well as continuities in people’s lives. What has been striking to me since I began to examine the local meanings of modernity on Kalymnos was the pervasiveness of the discourse, how it invaded every aspect of daily life, from the hair color of children to the choice of what kind of pot to use for boiling one’s stuffed grape leaves. This was true even before the commodification of food traditions that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, as producers of foods such as cheese and honey as well as restaurateurs were increasingly encouraged and given institutional support to sell

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